Berlinovo Wedding Blog

Rehearsal time

3pm rehearsal and remarkably everyone was there. I will not say that we started on time, because when you get a large group of people together the chatting starts. We started with the recessional, practiced the processional, the officiant went through the ceremony and then we practiced the recessional again. Mom and I both choked up walking up the aisle. I knew there was potential that I would be a basket case at the wedding. We did one last processional, stood up at the front when suddenly I realized I was missing something.  The bouquet! Otherwise known as the paper plate full of the ribbons from the bridal showers. We had to do a quick practice with that. After all of the practice we still ended right on schedule!

Attack of the stress monster

After the rehearsal, my fiance and I went back to our room with his family. We visited for a little while and they left to go to their rooms to relax a little before the rehearsal dinner. On their way out, my fiance’s nephew figured out that our suite had a door bell. He figured it out a few times, if you know what I mean. A few minutes after the family left, the doorbell rang again. We figured the family came back, but we were surprised when room service rolled in with champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries. Lovely! We called up some friends of ours that had come in from Colorado and invited them to share in our wedding bounty. We really wanted to find time to see our out of town guests since they had been kind enough to travel long distances to celebrate with us. That is the benefit of inviting the out of town guests to the rehearsal dinner. You get some semi-private time to visit with people who traveled to see you, because at the wedding it is really hard to spend any quality time with people.

So, we sat and enjoyed our champagne before we headed over to the restaurant, our normal Friday night hang out, for dinner. Dad pulled out the stops at the restaurant. We started with fried calamari and marinated eggplant salad. That was before the salad and dinner. Dinner ended with a Lasagna cake for my fiance. He kept joking that he wanted a lasagna cake for his groom’s cake so my mom had a picture of lasagna scanned onto an Italian rum cake to surprise him. It was great!

Unfortunately, the champagne on an empty stomach plus the fried food and garlic bread plus the lasagna and cake did not set well with my stomach. I went to the grocery store and picked up some Tums and some snacks for the next day. If anything had been drilled into me, it was the the bride NEEDED to eat on the wedding day.

We went back to our room and went to bed. I felt awful. I had taken Tums, but to no avail and I had a headache. Mom had made me an emergency pack with Advil among other things for the wedding day, but she had it in her purse. Not exactly helpful at 3am.

THINGS I LEARNED: Make sure to pack an emergency medical kit with band-aids, pain medication, Tums, safety pins, bobby pins, and other medical sundries. Make sure you have it with you as soon as you leave your house.

So I decided, against my better judgement, to take the only pain killer that we had, Tylenol PM. I knew it was risky to take a pain killer that was coupled with sleep medication, but the headache was too much for me to take. Little did I know. The Tylenol PM made me sick to my stomach. So I spent the rest of the night alternating between the bed and the bathroom floor. Needless to say, my fiance didn’t get much sleep either. Maybe that is what we got for eschewing the norm of staying apart the night before the wedding. Who knows. What I do know is that neither of us slept until about the time we were supposed to get up. And of course we had not set an alarm, because normally we are up by 7am. Thank goodness we had told our Colorado friends that they could stop by before 10am if they wanted to drop off our gift. The doorbell woke us up at 9:15. So much for a relaxing morning.

juggling 8 schedules at a time

A wedding is a carefully orchestrated event, with many players having to be at various places punctually for days. For some people this is old hat but for others it is as foreign as a Rothenburg sneeball. As much as I hate to admit it, I am normally in the sneeball catagory. So I made myself a schedule of where I needed to be, at what time, and what I needed to bring with me starting at 4:30 am on Thursday and ending at 10am on Sunday. After I did my schedule, I did my fiance’s.

Once I had done both of ours, I had to do schedules for people whose activities were interlaced with ours. Now I realize that this sounds very controlling, but in truth, I did this to ease the stress for the various folks that were involved in the wedding. My fiance’s family had been asking him for a while to outline what their days were going to be like. His standard answer of “uh, there is a rehearsal and dinner on Friday and the wedding is on Saturday at 5″ was not enough for them. So I made them a schedule, with locations and times of places they needed to be.

I scheduled the flower folks and the wedding clean up folks. I scheduled who was supposed to take what where, and when. By the end I had 8 schedules.  I handed them out to people as I saw them. Some people added more detail to the schedules. Others laughed and made numerous jokes about them. I knew they really appreciated them, at least that is what I told myself. 

Post-wedding: I am happy to report, everyone kept to their schedules!

The calm before the storm

On the Wednesday before the wedding there was nothing that we had to do until 3pm. I had a schedule starting at the crack of dawn Thursday, literally, going through midday Sunday, but Wednesday we were free. We wandered around the mall and returned a few gifts that were duplicates. We enjoyed some lunch and some ice cream (no more bridal diet at this point). And at 3pm I had a mani & pedi appointment. It was fabulously relaxing, although I had never had a manicure before so it was strange for me. I was very aware of my fingertips for a long time. After the manicure we went to get some engagement photos printed for our family members. Here is where the mistake was made. While we were waiting for the photos to be done (it only took 30 minutes), I suggested that we go to Pete’s to get a coffee and I didn’t get decaf. Ugh.

When we got home, we moved the furniture in our living room and created a dance floor to practice our dance. We had just learned the beginning and ending the night before, so we figured we should practice it. We were still practicing around 10:30pm, when my fiance finally kicked me out of the living room and up to bed. I had to get up at 4:15am the next morning to go to the flower mart. The problem? that darn coffee. I was pumped up on caffeine and could not go to sleep. I woke up every hour, worried about not getting up in time the next morning. It was a rough night.

Let them eat cake - Again!

We got to go to Bijan’s bakery today to order our cake. Our baker is a friend of my dad’s. He also happens to be the best baker in the bay area (at least in my opinion). We brought a picture of the cake that we liked. We have fewer people than we originally estimated so we are having a 3 layer cake instead of a 4 layer cake. This means that we had to pick between two layer flavors that we had already chosen. We didn’t remember what the two tasted like so we had to taste cake again. Well, maybe we kind of remembered what they tasted like, but we weren’t about to say no to cake.

We went with chocolate with fresh raspberries because my fiance liked it best There will be other flavors as well. Cake tasting is by far the best part of planning a wedding. I highly recommend doing it as often as you can!  

floods are in right?

My fiance and I went to go check out his tux on Tuesday. The tux rental shop we are using allows the groom to come in a few weeks early to try on his tux (rather than the Thursday before the wedding like everyone else) to make sure everything is correct. Good thing! The pants were more than a little short and the jacket was a little big. Not sure what happened with the original measurements, but they were a little off. Good thing we checked!

Are you NUTS?

This question is the first one to come out of anyone’s mouth when I start talking about my wedding flowers.

Let me assure you, I am not, indeed, nuts, although there have been days in the last seven months, that I have wondered.

After reading many bridal books and looking at a friend of mine’s initial wedding flower proposal (gasp!), I decided to “create” (there is that word Mom loves!) my own wedding arrangements. Now, I am not foolish enough to think that I can create bouquets and boutonnieres, but I have done flower arrangements for weddings before. Okay, make that one wedding, 10 plus years ago, but still! I have done it. Actually, my best friend and I have done it, so I enlisted her and her mom’s help.

This, by far, has been the biggest challenge. For months now, we have poured over books, websites, magazines, anything we could get our hands on, really, to try to figure out a design.

We have been to the Flower Mart to look at flowers and vases. We have done trial runs. We have bought flowers and put them in water to see how long they last and what they look like after a few days. We have done our homework. Cross your fingers! I have 6 volunteers that are willing to help the Friday before the wedding, so I am hoping to make fast work of it (or at least be done before the rehearsal!

Ring update

My fiance’s ring is in! No need to worry about it coming in last minute! Now let’s hope that he and I didn’t eat enough this weekend to push his finger to a different size!

post office efficiency

If you have not figured it out, I am a list maker. Early on in the wedding planning process, I started making lists of errands to do. Early on that list was get wedding stamps. So, one Saturday my fiance and I were at the mall and we saw a post office. We decided to buy our wedding stamps, 300 of them to be exact. Cross that off of the list!

Literally, the next day, as I was driving into work, I heard that the US Post Master had decided to increase the postage from 39 cents to 41 cents, effective May something-or-other. $#*&#@)!! My invitations were not supposed to go out until late June. So the next week, we went BACK to the mall post office, with the receipt, to return the stamps. The postal employee told me to just hold on to the stamps until the 41 cent stamps came out and we could do a swap. Okay, no problem.

The 41 cent stamps came out and off we went to the post office, but this time, we went to a different one (because the mall is further away). I explained what happened to the postal employee and she took the receipt and the stamps. She scanned the receipt and the machine beeped. “I am sorry”, she said, “You can’t return these, because we cannot resell them. You can buy a 2 cent stamp”. Um what?? She confirmed this with another postal employee who dutifully agreed with her. RSVP envelopes are not that big. Two stamps would over power them. I was not happy.

My fiance, in his calmness, said, “Let’s go back to the mall and see if we can get the same guy that we got last time”.

“Okay”, I sulked.

We got to the mall and the guy that we had talked to a few months before was there. We got into his line. When we got up to the front, we explained what had happened with the 39 cent stamp purchase (no mention of the previous post office). He took the stamps and the receipt to scan. The machine beeped when he scanned the receipt. He looked quizzically at the monitor. Looked at the stamps. Tick tick tick on the computer, “The difference is six dollars more.” FABULOUS! Thank you very much! Disaster averted. Now why that OTHER post office could not manage that transaction is beyond me, but I should have learned not to use that “other” post office. Did I learn? No.

Favors

There are many options for wedding favors. We all have them: ice cream scoops, ice tongs, CDs of the bride and groom’s favorite songs. The Internet is full of trinkets that can be engraved, boxes of candies, you name it, they have it. What I wanted was traditional. I just wanted old fashioned Jordan almonds, tied it tulle. My mom wanted ribbon with my fiance and my name and the wedding date. Simple right? Not once you start looking.

There are these amazing Jordan almond flowers that are created in Italy. They are beautiful. However, in the spirit of saving money, they are not doable. Unfortunately, after seeing these lovely flowers, I was no longer as happy with just wrapping my Jordan almonds in tulle. I wanted to create flowers (my mother and fiance cringe whenever they hear that I want to “create” anything. I am convinced they would both outsource the whole thing.)

So I went in search of ways to create my own Jordan almond flowers. I am going to compile the list of sites I found, because if any other poor soul is looking for these items, I would like to help them out.

http://www.confettipelino.com/

http://www.jordanalmondflowers.com/rachetti.htm

http://www.weddingfavours.uk.com/?page=shop/browse&category_id=d4507d863d9eeef28e67fe4bc22333d9

http://www.myitalianweddingfavors.com/Italian_Ribbon_Confetti.html

http://www.giftfavors.com/Tabledecor5.html

After much searching I settled on ribbon that pulls into a flower. I chose this mainly because of ease. There is not quite as much “creating” involved with these flowers (Mom’s suggestion, surprisingly).

Jordan almonds were the next thing to tackle. I learned that there are different grades of Jordan almonds. The better the grade, the less candy coating there is on the almonds. Did I want colored almonds or white ones? I decided to order the highest grade white almond and to have them delivered close to the wedding so that they would be nice and fresh. These means that in week 2 before the wedding, we will be making favors.